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she made herself match his calmness. “Are they all really terrible?”
    “It’s not that the people are always stupid,” he said. “It’s just that business ideas are usually only worthwhile in the context of doing business. You know, when you have a problem to solve, the solution to the problem could be a great business idea. But I guess you’re not interested in business.”
    They had arrived at the elevator; he pulled a little key out of his pocket and put it into the wall.
    She said, “Oh, it’s interesting. Though I don’t know much about any business except . . .”
    “Yes, actually, a lot of the elevator-ride business ideas turn out to be porn.”
    She laughed. “Oh, well, you know I never wanted to be in porn.”
    “You wanted to be a veterinarian.”
    She frowned at him.
    “I’ve read your interviews,” he said. “I was wondering why you hadn’t asked how I could be a fan without having seen the show.”
    Then the elevator had arrived, and he was drawing back the gates; the thundering sound it made relieved her from the necessity of answering. He stepped back to let her get into the elevator first. He entered after, and the thundering sound came again as he closed the cage.
    Then they were standing together in the enclosed space, shoulder to shoulder. Emily was keenly aware of every detail: the elevator’s hum, the cool air, his shoulder inches away from her. The moment that he turned toward her, she was keenly aware of turning toward him, her heart pounding as if everything she cared about was hanging in the balance.
    He said, “Hold still.”
    Then he put his hand on her cheek and bent down and kissed her on the forehead. It was a gentle kiss that contained the same enigmatic freight of tenderness—it had been tenderness—she’d seen in his eyes earlier. It made her feel weak and desperate. When he let her go and stood back, she felt as lonely as she’d ever felt in her life.
    Then the elevator doors opened. He pulled back the gate and she stepped out, propelled by the necessity of acting normal. People had to behave as if they were sane, even if they weren’t sane at all. Even if they had just felt the craziest thing they’d ever felt in their lives.
    But when she heard the gate begin to thunder closed behind her, she whirled in a panic. He put his hand to the cage and said, “So long.”
    Then the elevator doors closed again and she was walking, stumbling, through the lobby.
    She took a cab home—she couldn’t face going back to the studio. In the cab, she sat with her eyes closed, trying to find a way back to her daily life. She knew if she let herself think about Ralph, she would only be miserable. Still, she thought about Ralph. “You wanted to be a veterinarian,” he’d said, and even though it was something he’d read in a magazine, it still made her feel impossibly warm and known.
    When she wasn’t avoiding thinking about Ralph, she was avoiding thinking of In Depth, which meant, of course, that she thought about it. Not for the first time, she longed to put it all behind her, to go back to being an everyday person who could walk down the street without having people stare and nudge their friends. A person who could meet a man without obsessively wondering whether he judged her, whether he liked her for herself or for the idea of dating a porn star—whether he was The One but was dismissing her because he didn’t want to deal with competition from a hundred hours of X-rated film.

    When In Depth had started, the interviewees were still ordinary members of the public. It was nearly impossible to get celebrities to have public sex even now, and Emily’s ability to do so was one of the things that made her XTV’s greatest asset. With an unknown hostess on a brand-new network, it had been completely impossible. So the focus was on men with interesting stories (“I survived a plane crash in the Himalayas,” “I’m a real-life cowboy,” etc.) who were both